expanse
46
4.6
- noun
- /ɪkˈspæns/
:
extensión
- The sea around them was a vast expanse of bobbing heads and torsos.
- a vast expanse
- a wide expanse
- a large expanse
I'm not, I don't have any great big expanses of grass.
- I'm not, I don't have any great big expanses of grass.
- Whereas Arabia is essentially a vast expanse of barely habitable terrain.
- But how do you structure a society across those vast expanses of distance and time?
- And so there's a huge, an incredibly huge expanse of things that could be considered art.
- We then went through this pass, which is such a beautiful geographic expanse, right?
- With more and more time, that perspective changes until you have a greater Vista of a greater expanse of what you can see.
- And the sky is the vast expanse without which there wouldn't be any room for the clouds.
- That would be really bad because we're this one planet in this, you know, cosmic, cosmic void, this massive expanse.
- Whatever islands these are, in whatever ocean this is, this expanse of glowing blue, one part smoother than any other.
- If that's the case, then, well, we know that there's an entire expanse of wavelengths outside of our perceptive abilities.
- It's got, I think it's, it's like one of the biggest expanses of freshwater there is in the world, just in terms of volume, maybe the biggest.
Examples
-
The universe... a vast expanse of space and matter.
-
We are going to show you just what life is like for the three of us here in the vast expanse of outer space.
-
But that said, they had complete control over this whole vast expanse of land.
-
The area is characterized by wide expanses of flat bottom in deep water.
Academic text (1990) -
And the sky is the vast expanse without which there wouldn't be any room for the clouds.
-
"The mouse looked out a dusty window at the vast expanse of sand and rock."
Fiction book (1991) -
Flying low over treetops, over an expanse of green, intersected by brown roads and tracks.
Fiction book (1991) -
A second logistical problem for the British involved the huge expanse of land that constituted the colonies.
-
The house, white in the moonlight, loomed fifty meters away across an expanse of carefully manicured lawn.
Fiction book (1990) -
The hikers marveled at the vast expanse of green fields stretching before them.
Synonyms
∞
1.0
An empty area available for use
165
3.5
A wide movement of the hand or arm
121
2.7
A long continuous part of land, road, or water
55
3.5
The area or distance something covers
18
1.0
An outdoor area with no cover
13
9.9
The sky above the earth that people imagine as a wide dome with stars
8
4.8
A wide clear view of a large area seen from a high place
Antonyms
How Wide
Surface Forms
Morphology
expanse = expand (semi-transparent) = ex + pans
The noun is clearly related in meaning to the verb 'expand', so learners can often guess the sense, but the internal segmentation (ex- + pans) is Latin-derived and not a productive modern English morpheme pattern, so it is not fully transparent.
Etymology
Expanse comes from the Latin word expandere meaning 'to spread out' and it shares the same root as expand. So an expanse is simply an area that is 'spread out', a wide open space of land, water, or sky.